Category: Uncategorized
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What happens when there's no recount possible?
Greetings, This is my first posting on Freedom To Tinker, so a brief introduction first. I’ve been involved in electronic voting technology issues for about five years, as founder of Virginia Verified Voting where I wrote the law that prohibited purchase of more DREs (i.e., paperless voting machines), as a researcher on the EAC Voting…
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Dr. Felten Goes to Washington
Today the Federal Trade Commission announced that I will become their Chief Technologist, effective January 1. My main role at the FTC will be to provide advice on technology policy issues. (Princeton has an announcement too.) What does this mean for Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy? During my time at the FTC, I’ll be…
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Finding the best ideas in the world
Policy-makers often strive to solicit ideas from the public, but making this process effective is very, very hard. Americans need only think back to the health-reform town hall meetings last summer, many of which devolved into chaos. Online approaches, such as President Obama’s virtual town hall meeting, have also ran into problems. So, how can…
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Paper vs. Electronic Voting in Today's Election in Houston
(Cross-posted at the Computing@Rice blog at the Houston Chronicle.) Back in late August, Harris County (Houston)’s warehouse with all 10,000 of our voting machines, burned to the ground. As I blogged at the time, our county decided to spend roughly $14 million of its $40 million insurance settlement on purchasing replacement electronic voting machines of…
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E-Voting Links for Election Day
Today, of course, is Election Day in the U.S. Many of our U.S. readers will be casting their votes electronically. CITP has been front and center on the e-voting issue. Here’s a quick set of CITP e-voting links: Video of CITP lecture by Hari Prasad, on India’s e-voting system Alex Halderman and his students’ analysis…
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NJ court permits release of post-trial briefs in voting case
In 2009 the Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, held a trial on the legality of using paperless direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. Plaintiffs in the suit argued that because it’s so easy to replace the software in a DRE with fraudulent software that cheats in elections, DRE voting systems do not guarantee the…
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Court permits release of unredacted report on AVC Advantage
In the summer of 2008 I led a team of computer scientists in examining the hardware and software of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. I did this as a pro-bono expert witness for the Plaintiffs in the New Jersey voting-machine lawsuit. We were subject to a Protective Order that, in essence, permitted publication of…
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HTC Willfully Violates the GPL in T-Mobile's New G2 Android Phone
[UPDATE (Oct 14, 2010): HTC has released the source code. Evidently 90-120 days was not in fact necessary, given that they managed to do it 7 days after the phone’s official release. It is possible that the considerable pressure from the media, modders, kernel copyright holders, and other kernel hackers contributed to the apparently accelerated…
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General Counsel's Role in Shoring Up Authentication Practices Used in Secure Communications
Business conducted over the Internet has benefited hugely from web-based encryption. Retail sales, banking transactions, and secure enterprise applications have all flourished because of the end-to-end protection offered by encrypted Internet communications. An encrypted communication, however, is only as secure as the process used to authenticate the parties doing the communicating. The major Internet browsers…